I guess I'm interested to know what the general consensus for the use of .* is. Is it something to be avoided at all costs, or is it a powerful, oft-misused tool that can be useful and beneficial in carefully controlled circumstances?

My rule of thumb for .* versus .*? is that the former is for grabbing everything after a certain point (I can't be bothered with $') and the latter for grabbing data between 2 points. So I guess it's a 'powerful oft-misused tool', but that's more due to the fact that people aren't aware of the concept of quantifier greediness.

While I'm at it *grin*, does anyone have a "better idea" for pulling the data out of the tags?

Due to the nature of XML it might be a good idea to have more layered regexes e.g

## *very* simplistic stuff (e.g doesn't deal with nested tags)

my $token     = qr{ (?: \b [A-Z]\w+ \b ) }xi;
my $attrib    = qr{ (?: $token \s* = \s* "[^"]+" \s* ) }x;
my $begin_tag = qr{ < ( $token ) \s* ( $attrib* ) > }x;
my $end_tag   = qr{ </$token> }x;

my $example = q[<ClientID type="String">A1234BX</ClientID>];

my($tag, $attribs, $data) =
  $example =~ m{ $begin_tag (.*?) $end_tag }x;

print "tag     - $tag\n";
print "attribs - $attribs\n";
print "data    - $data\n";

__output__

tag     - ClientID
attribs - type="String"
data    - A1234BX
[download]

That could be simplified into a single regex, but like most things complex, they're much easier to digest if they're broken down into smaller components.
HTH

_________
broquaint